Archives
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Yahoo! Pipes - Rewire The Web
Recently I've discovered a fantastic free service provided by Yahoo! which makes it possible to convert any XML data feed into a JSON data feed. http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ It is easy to create a pipe that provides a JSON data feed with a callback function for web services that don't actually implement that functionality in their API.
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I Pounce On The Pownce API
The microblogging site http://www.pownce.com/ has opened to the general public so I decided to give their API a try. But the main point of this blog post is to dispute the assertion that JSON is "easy for humans to read and write". It is not easy to read! JSON is a mess of curly braces, brackets, and quoted strings that is even more difficult to read than XML. I had considerable trouble working with the JSON data that Pownce provides because it seems to be nonstandard and requires the use of array indices which aren't usually needed. At first I tried to determine the data's object model by loading the XML version into XML Spy and finding the XPaths for a value. This was only slightly useful. Then I found a JSON Viewer on CodePlex which proved to be extremely helpful.
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ASP.NET 2.0 Design Templates Are Available
After I wrote my last blog post I did a search for ASP.NET design sites and found an old set of design templates on MSDN. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/asp.net/aa336602.aspx This appears to be a special section of MSDN that Microsoft created for designers who will be working with ASP.NET 2.0. I also found an old blog post from July 2005 which seems to be about this Dev Center for designers: http://blogs.msdn.com/bgold/archive/2005/07/15/439299.aspx Unfortunately I get the impression that this project didn't attract much interest or continue beyond its initial effort. For instance, there is a dead link for Building ASP.NET 2.0 Web Sites Using Web Standards. However, there are several design templates for you to download and examine. This resource seems to be all but forgotten. It was not mentioned in the Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Design: CSS, Themes, and Master Pages book I read or linked to on the official Starter Kit web page so I thought I'd draw attention to it here.
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ASP.NET Web Design - Beyond CSS
I haven't really searched for ASP.NET web design ideas and styles but I certainly have not come across anything through my casual reading of online articles. You can find plenty of material on the technical aspects of themes, ASP.NET 2.0 CSS Friendly Control Adapters, master pages, and skins but nobody applies any actual design to their examples. I've been researching many web design sites but their focus is entirely on CSS. Web designers don't seem to concern themselves with anything except the CSS while developers totally avoid applying the eye candy. This leaves being visually creative with ASP.NET an uncharted territory.
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Amazon Wish List In JSON
Today I explored some alternative JavaScript coding methods to make it easier to dynamically create DOM elements. I used jQuery and the jQuery Plugin, FlyDOM, to work with the Amazon web service API. I bought the book Amazon.com Mashups by Francis Shanahan from the Computer Books Direct club which is closing and selling books cheap. I have not read the book yet but there is a chapter on converting Amazon data directly into JSON using XSLT (hmm, interesting) and it actually covers several other APIs and the technology behind mashups. There was some mention of Amazon wish lists which attracted my attention because I use wish lists to save books that I come across which I may want to buy some day. In other words, this is personal data that I am actually interested in.
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JavaScript Libraries
I've been working a lot with JavaScript lately so I decided to check out all the JavaScript libraries that are available. Many of these libraries have useful utility methods and modules for JSON and AJAX. There are six libraries that I intend to explore; the Microsoft AJAX Client Library (I need to see what was added in 3.5), the Prototype JavaScript Framework, the Dojo Toolkit, MochiKit, and the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI), and jQuery.
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Document Your CSS As A Poster
I've been using StumbleUpon to find interesting web sites about web development and yesterday I found a site that will generate a poster of your CSS. It creates an image that resembles a class diagram. I think it is a great way to document your style sheets. One of my style sheets produced such a massive and confusing diagram that I think I'll show it to my client so I'll look like a genius.
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Visual Studio Woes
I was working on converting an ASP.NET 1.1 web site to ASP.NET 2.0 today but I will probably regret it because I have been having problems with Visual Studio 2005 and Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition. Ever since I have installed Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition I've been finding the msiexec.exe (Windows Installer) process running and bogging down my PC. This occurs every now and then when I'm using either Visual Studio 2005 or the Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition. Below is a screenshot of the culprit in Process Explorer where you can see it hogging the CPU.
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Developing Web Widgets
Last night I finally finished the improvements to my xml2json generic handler which were required to develop a Stickam widget. Since I am sending the URL of the feed as a query string value to the generic handler it was necessary to deal with ampersands in the feed's URL without screwing up the query string. So I added a line to replace the | character with the & character. If I have a feed with an ampersand in the URL I'll just send it with the | character instead. Trace listeners don't seem to work in generic handlers so I added code to write the feed URL and the JSON string to a log file for debugging purposes. The Stickam players in the XML were causing invalid JSON syntax because they were not getting null values. I am not interested in that information so I used RegexBuddy to come up with the regular expression to replace them with empty strings. I came across the infamous "invalid label name" error so I added parentheses around my JSON string. The last thing I did was add XML comments for the method that actually converts the XML to JSON because this code should be replace when a more reliable algorithm becomes available:
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JSON Syntax Checker Tool
Yesterday I found a useful tool for checking the syntax of JavaScript Object Notation strings: http://www.raboof.com/Projects/JsonChecker/ I needed that because I'm trying to create a widget for Stickam that will work in my compiled help file. I'm using my xml2json generic handler to convert XML to JSON and apparently it generated some invalid JSON. This tool helped me to narrow down the location of the syntax error.